Why BioShock Infinite’s Creator Won’t Settle for Success

BioShock Infinite might be the most ambitious videogame ever.Image: Courtesy Irrational Games

Image: Courtesy Irrational Games

Image: Courtesy Irrational Games

Image: Courtesy Irrational Games

Image: Courtesy Irrational Games

Image: Courtesy Irrational Games

In 2007, Irrational Games released BioShock, a videogame that took the first-person perspective and remorseless slaughter of blockbusters like Halo and Call of Duty and set fire to the medium’s narrative conventions and audience expectations. The result may have been gaming’s first work of art. As protagonist Jack, the player explored a city called Rapture, an undersea metropolis built in the 1940s. The game actually took place in 1960, by which time Rapture’s gorgeous Art Deco architecture had become dilapidated and the residents feral.

BioShock teemed with monsters out of Jules Verne’s nightmares. Giant creatures called Big Daddies lumbered around in archaic diving suits with spherical helmets, emitting unintelligible whalelike moans and skewering players with enormous drills while their doll-like child companions, the Little Sisters, harvested genetic material from the corpses. The player, using cryptic audio recordings and graffiti, could gradually piece together Rapture’s history: a catastrophically failed experiment in libertarianism built by an Ayn Rand-like character. At its core, BioShock functioned as an unmistakable critique of Objectivism, Rand’s laissez-faire philosophy. As such, it was the first political manifesto that allowed you to kill people with swarms of bees emitted from your genetically modified hands.

BioShock may be the most critically celebrated game ever produced. Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for The Washington Post, said that BioShock demonstrated that videogames “obviously have artistic value.” Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro called it “one of the most fully realized world creations in any medium.” But this wasn’t some cult sensation. It was a mainstream commercial success, selling a surprising 5 million-plus copies and turning Ken Levine, the game’s creative director as well as the president and cofounder of Irrational Games, into a videogame celebrity—along with the Big Daddies, one of which made an appearance on The Simpsons.

For Levine, who spent his youth marinating in comics and obsessing over Dungeons & Dragons, the level of popularity induced by what he calls “our weird little game” was a novel experience. “When I was growing up, I was incredibly lonely,” he says. “Nobody liked the things I liked.” He’s 46 now, a Jersey kid with a nasal voice and a Sawyer-on-Lost beard. But whereas he was once an exile on the far-nerd end of childhood’s continuum, BioShock’s reception brought him acceptance—even an interview request from a sports-talk radio station.

Yet when given the chance to make a straightforward sequel to BioShock, Levine declined. “Usually a sequel is 10 new levels, five new monsters, a few new weapons,” he says. “It’s more corporate- driven than creatively driven.” Instead he and his team got busy plotting a complete reinvention of the game. Irrational’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, wasn’t about to pass on the opportunity to milk a little more money out of BioShock, so different developers made 2010’s BioShock 2 (which contained nine new levels and fewer than five new monsters in its single-player campaign). The sequel scored decent reviews, but it failed to penetrate the wider culture in the way that Levine hungers to do.

In fact, even the original BioShock failed to match his ambitions. “Culturally we’re in a relatively weird place right now,” Levine says. “You haven’t had that thing that communicates to everybody the promise of what a videogame can be.” Music and movies are almost universal, he notes. For instance, Cliff Bleszinski, cocreator of the blockbuster Gears of War game franchise and one of the most visible figures in the gaming industry, has just 175,000 followers on Twitter, while Justin Bieber’s manager has 2 million. “There’s nothing in the language of gameplay that speaks to such a broad audience,” Levine says. “OK, Angry Birds. But that’s not really, to me, the full expression of what games can be about, in terms of narrative, in terms of immersion.”

Which raises a thorny question: Can a videogame become an influential cultural artifact in these days of disposable 99-cent iPhone titles? Even Call of Duty, with its tens of millions of copies sold, is not that game, Levine feels. “Its penetration is very narrow but deep,” he says. On the other hand: “Everybody saw Avatar, but they’re kind of done with it. It’s wide but shallow. I think you want to be wide and deep.” What would represent Levine and Irrational’s dream for the new incarnation of BioShock? “Harry Potter,” he says, “is pretty wide and deep.”

The fact that BioShock Infinite was originally codenamed Project Icarus is lost on nobody.

When Levine’s attempt at a wide and deep game—BioShock Infinite —comes out in late February, it will be the first title from Irrational in five years. By the standards of videogame developers, many of whom pump out sequels every year, that’s a hiatus akin to the two-decade gap between Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. And like a Malick movie, BioShock Infinite is jam-packed with its creator’s obsessions and flights of fancy. The opening sequence is drenched in biblical imagery, with an American prophet leading his followers to a city in the sky, where Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington are revered as quasi deities and racial purity is imposed by force. The game’s backdrop is an imagined clash 100 years ago between theocratic white supremacists and violent collectivists.

Whether Levine and Irrational can realize this vision is an open question. Last May, Levine announced that the game, which had been slated for an October release, would be delayed until February 2013. Since then, Irrational has seen several high-profile departures, including the art director and the director of product development, both core members of the creative team. Rumors have churned around BioShock Infinite: blown deadlines, scrapped gameplay elements, an idea doomed by its own grandeur. The fact that the game was originally known within Irrational as Project Icarus is lost on nobody.

Bioshock Infinite’s Sky-Line rain system in action

One thing is sure: The struggle to make a product that meets Levine’s oceanic definition of artistic success has changed the company fundamentally. Irrational has grown from three cofounders to 115 employees; Levine says he no longer knows everyone who works for him. He has to be brutally blunt when their work does not meet his expectations. And as the deadline looms for Irrational to lock in and ship the final version of BioShock Infinite, the forums and blogs where videogame fans congregate reflect concern that it may well be a troubled game—one that instead of showing a way forward for the medium will be remembered forever as an example of What Not to Do.

For Irrational Games cofounder Ken Levine, BioShock Infinite isn’t just a reinvention of his popular videogame—it’s an attempt to prove that videogames can make an enduring cultural impact. Photo: Guido Vitti

Here is an incomplete list of the things Levine says have inspired BioShock Infinite: the presidential administration of William McKinley; the Spanish- American war; the blistering pace of technological change in the early 20th century, with the introduction of electricity, telephones, cars, airplanes, phonographs, and movies; the 1893 Columbian Exposition at the Chicago World’s Fair; Eugene V. Debs; Emma Goldman; a black-and-white photo of young boys sitting next to a dead horse on a cobblestone street in turn-of-the-century New York; The Music Man; It’s a Wonderful Life; the sequence in Back to the Future when Marty McFly first arrives in the 1955 town square; that scene in The Shining where the two little dead girls appear; Blue Velvet; the chest-bursting scene in Alien; Roman Holiday; the cover of X-Men #141; the sun reflecting off a metal mailbox during a jog on a sunny day; roller coasters; an off-Broadway play called Sleep No More; and a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Songbird” performed on Glee (“It’s so embarrassing that I’m almost tempted to say this has to be off the record,” Levine says).

BioShock Infinite is set in 1912, aboard the floating city of Columbia—a sort of steampunk Death Star. While the first BioShock was a reductio ad absurdum of Randian politics, Infinite examines other facets of the conservative mind: religious nationalism, xenophobia, American exceptionalism. The player arrives in Columbia to find it in the midst of a civil war between the Vox Populi—a leftist party that parallels the socialists and anarchists of the time, as well as later groups like the Baader Meinhof—and a rightist party called the Founders, devotees of a seductive fundamentalism that embraces the notion of an older, purer, truer United States. The Founders share qualities with groups like the 19th-century anti-immigrant party the Know Nothings, the John Birch Society, and the Tea Party, which combine economic conservatism, nationalism, and religion. There are zeppelins and mechanical horses and a girl with the power to tear the fabric of space and time.

Your in-game guide, Elizabeth, alters time

Somehow, despite showing the game at trade shows and press events for nearly two years, Irrational has protected Infinite’s plot so well that people still have no idea what it’s about. What they do know is that the protagonist is a man named Booker who travels to Columbia to rescue the Rapunzel-like girl with the power to rend spacetime. Her name is Elizabeth, and she is your ward and your guide throughout much of the game. As you navigate Columbia via a sprawling network of midair roller-coaster-like tracks, you’re chased by a giant robotic creature called Songbird, Elizabeth’s onetime guardian, whom Levine likens to an abusive boyfriend.

In-game guide Elizabeth calms the robotic Songbird.

This is the game that Levine thinks can be a mass-market sensation. Yet at the same time that he targets a broad audience, he has to avoid alienating the hardcore gamers he won over with the original BioShock. “You can be M. Night Shyamalan. You can be George Lucas,” says Nate Wells, who worked with Levine for more than a decade before jumping ship last summer for Naughty Dog, maker of the Uncharted series. Shyamalan and Lucas created geek touchstones but have since been reassessed—if not reviled—by erstwhile fans. “Their faces are the ones that haunt Ken at night,” Wells says.

The decor in the Irrational Games offices is Boilerplate Nerd: workstations styled with Terry Pratchett novels, a velvet painting of Jesus blessing a tractor- trailer. Housed above a hearing-aid dispensary in a decrepit stretch of Quincy, a Boston suburb, it’s just the sort of geek heaven that Levine says he discovered in the 1990s at his first job in the business. He found a home in videogames after studying drama at Vassar and failing as a screenwriter in Hollywood (where he lived with three roommates: Marisa Tomei’s brother, the star of Leprechaun 2, and the redheaded actress from The Goonies).

President Evil, Inside Out

1. Concept art for the Motorized Patriot’s clockwork skeleton.

2. A sketch exploring the look and feel of the relentless animatronic George Washington.

3. The finished Motorized Patriot, in all its gun-toting glory.

Images courtesy of Irrational Games

Working with Levine cannot be easy. He is a demanding boss, with a maniacal focus on the small details that he says are the difference between a good game and a bad one. He is willing to throw out large chunks of work when he thinks an idea is on the wrong side of that divide, and he’s not afraid to start over, almost from scratch. Infinite was first set in a dark quasi-Parisian Art Nouveau world and centered on a conflict between Luddites and technologists—a story line that has since been entirely scrapped. “There was no game that we set out to make five years ago,” Levine says. “You have to be open to letting the game talk to you.”

Yet Levine is also good-humored, unperturbed by a little gentle mockery from his colleagues. Last year, after he covered five sheets of paper with a chicken-scratched, stick-figure storyboard for an Infinite television commercial, Irrational hosted an internal contest to parse what in God’s name the boss was asking them to do. Employees filmed themselves explaining the impenetrable plot, and the one who was deemed the best interpreter of Levine’s actual vision was awarded a “Ken Whisperer” trophy. The storyboard was framed and is now displayed inside the building.

During multiple visits to Irrational over the course of more than a year, I witnessed Levine trying to corral BioShock Infinite into the vision in his mind. “What the fuck—really? That’s a swing and a miss,” he told the game’s animation director last January after seeing early versions of the Motorized Patriot, a robotic sentry that looks like an animatronic character from Disneyworld’s Hall of Presidents crossed with a sphinx. “He’s going to walk a fine line between high-larious and creepy,” Levine said. “And right now he’s landing in high-larious.”

For Levine, character itself—dynamic artificially intelligent personae, as opposed to tactically competent enemies—is the technical and fictional frontier he’s trying to conquer in BioShock Infinite. The ideal is a character who genuinely interacts with the player rather than just shoots on sight. A group of designers, artists, and programmers was charged with accomplishing one of the riskiest and most technically forbidding goals Levine has set for BioShock Infinite: making Elizabeth resemble a human rather than an automaton who repeats the same tedious lines over and over (the unfortunate norm for videogame AI companions). Levine’s vision is for Elizabeth to observe the world around her and engage with it—but only when it’s contextually appropriate. She won’t tell a lighthearted joke if a big battle just ended, or cry over a sad memory and then immediately begin laughing at a puppy that wanders by.

The AI puzzle that Elizabeth presents is all the more difficult because there’s no model for Levine to follow, no masterwork he can look to for inspiration. The medium is still in its infancy—where film was around 1935, he says. “It’s exciting to think that when I’m dead there will still be people doing things in this industry who will look back at me as this sort of caveman,” he says. “Which is great. It would be great if I could live to see what it’s going to be when we’re as old as the film industry. I think it’s probably going to be unrecognizable.”

To the extent that he’s ever content, Levine is feeling pleased about the game, eager to finally get it into players’ hands. “The last level—there’s nothing like it that’s ever been in a video-game,” he says. Yet the whole thing is still an unknowable gamble. “Infinite is either going to be something that really moves people in a profound way,” Levine says, “or it’s going to be something that a lot of gamers look at and go, huh?”

And if some fans began to doubt him over the past five years, if some employees did the same, Levine says, he understands why: “I ask for a lot of faith from the people around me. Either it gets geometrically better one day, or it doesn’t. But generally it’s crap until we’re really far along.” He adds, “The further you get away from what people know, the more doubt it causes.”

Soon after this magazine goes to press, BioShock Infinite is scheduled to be submitted to Microsoft and Sony—manufacturers of the game consoles it will be played on—for final testing and formal approval. A physical shrink-wrapped disc is just over the horizon, with Levine’s dream coded on it. Maybe this will be the game that gets written up in magazines alongside the latest hot HBO drama, that gets joked about on late-night talk shows, that influences the people who make the novels and TV shows and movies that Levine adores. Anything less—no matter how many copies it sells, how many dollars it rakes in, how many Game of the Year awards it wins—may well be, in his eyes, a failure.

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